While westerners are being told to alter their lifestyles and have fewer children to save the planet, nothing is being said about or to the people in the countries responsible for the vast majority of pollution.

So why are Westerners being targeted rather than African or Asian populations?

This is probably one of the main reasons why many in the west remain skeptical about the true motives of the environmentalist movement.

Recent international study showed how deniers of the problem of unsustainable development, waste and MMCC clearly concentrate in the rich developed nations with the US very much heading the pack. The surprising thing in the finding was how high awareness actually was in the poorer parts of the world. There really is a solid base for turning this whole situation right around with some coordinated policy for a change.

That claim may have some validity in the city/urban areas, but in the rural districts less so. The main issue there is the relative poverty forces everything to be sold in smaller portions; locals need, say, detergent:

In the west a 350ml/500ml bottle would be the norm. A (typical) SE Asian villager can't afford that but can afford a 50ml or 100ml bottle, so that is all that is available (rurally). Hence 2 or 3 times the plastic for the same product (volume) sold.

That same poverty drives local recycling. That empty 100ml container inevitably finds several other uses before - if it ever - hits the waste tip/ocean.

It's not African & SE Asian people's aboriginal lifestyles that is the (root cause of the) problem - it's the consumerism western companies have sold them in their drive to increase their own profits.

Single use plastic in SE Asia is ridiculous- everything seems to come in little plastic sachets that just gets thrown away.

However, I imagine most of the consumers simply don't have sufficient education to realise what the impact of all this is. (And some don't care, too.) The businesses producing them certainly don't give a fuck.

But as mentioned it doesn't help that lots of our 'recycling' actually just gets sent there for them to have to deal with, and they don't have capacity to.

Westerners have to try and lead by example. Yes, us cutting down won't solve the problem when other parts of the world are still using and chucking vast amounts, but it's a start.

If anybody has lived and worked in any of these third-worl...sorry...developing nations, they will know that most of the populations of said countries throw FUCK ALL away until there is absolutely no possibility that it has a use somewhere else/resale value.

The problem is 100% a western middle-class consumerism attitude that runs along the lines of "We're so fucking well off we can now throw away so much (re-)useable stuff. Look at our rubbish bin! It's like Santa's fucking sack!",

Cretinous argument. Because other countries are a bunch of cunts we can be cunts too.It is possible to stop something globally; the Montreal Protocol showed how to do it. There is no reason whatsoever to give up.

There are a number of reasons for this.1. They have larger populations than us. they need to catch up2. we've been sending all our waste to them. They have just been dumping it. That's just a market economy, globalised type thing.3. The general trend in the world has been for market economies and cheap globalised capitalism aided and abetted by science.

A massive amount of the plastic coming from Africa and Asia is rubbish created by the Western World. The third world takes it for our cash in the hope that it can be recycled into trainers; T shirts; etc. We send them unsorted shit that they can't deal with or use. They simply do not have the facilities, regulations, or enforcement to cope so they dump it or burn it. China used to take it but stopped because the enlightened, developed world was taking the piss. Weaker economies stepped in with disastrous results.Sure they dump and burn stuff of their own but the UK; USA; Canada and Australia are much more responsible for the problem than lesser developed economies. China and, of course Japan have little in the way of concern for the damage they do to the environment either at home or abroad.It's a serious fucking problem.